Calendar

Everything posted by Justin Jaudon

I think this is the list of wings who will be competing with Mario for contracts bigger than what we can already offer him:
Tyreke Evens
Avery Bradley
Will Barton
JJ Redick
KCP
Wes Matthews
Danny Green
Rodney Hood (R)
Trevor Ariza
Kyle Anderson (R)
Rudy Gay
Most of these guys are situational, whether they'd go to a contender or a building team. The teams with real big money likely aren't throwing anything substantial at a vet, considering the teams with money mostly are rebuilding. So who's likely to throw a contract at Mario? Who has money? The Bulls, Hawks, and Mavericks probably have the most money, except the Lakers, who won't tie up any money long term they don't have to on anyone but a star, I'd think. Maybe the Kings? The Jazz will go after a more established player. I can't see Phoenix going after him, not when they're already developing at least 3 wings under 25. If the Clippers renounce everyone and commit to rebuild, I could see them making a play. Danilo would be a good mentor for him. I don't think the Knicks will go after him (pretty sure he'd eat up all the cap room they have), but I suppose they might. New Jersey is a solid possibility, I guess. He fits their build (grab young cast-offs for cheap and give them a shot); but how much money do they have left after taking on all those contracts last year? Will anyone else have any money? The Pacers (I think that might literally break me, to watch Oladipo, Mario, and Turner play well elsewhere)?

I think it's because there's a difference between bad defensively and not knowing what to do defensively. I've said since his second year, Payton's problem is that he doesn't seem to work as part of the team on defense. He just attacks anything near him and otherwise doesn't know what to do. Augustine, while not particularly good at attacking the ball-handler, doesn't find himself out of position, knows how to handle a screen, and focuses his attention on keeping the ball-handler from the spots on the floor where he'll do the most damage. Jameer was solid with this as well, despite being a small, unimpressive defender. It's the difference between having a Bengal Tiger guarding your home, but he doesn't know to stay near the door, and having a Golden Retriever who sits on the porch and just barks at anything that approaches the door.

It really does happen a lot. A lot of people thought Klay Thompson was a reach where he was drafted; he was a low-ceiling guy who wasn't supposed to be able to keep up defensively and would just be a spot-up shooter. Eric Bledsoe was a 2-guard with not enough handles to play PG and not a good enough passer. Paul George couldn't get his own shots. Kawhi Leonard was too unskilled to play SF. Draymond Green was, hilariously, not considered even a good defender, on top of being too small to play PF. Khris Middleton was too slow. C.J. McCollum was too small to play SG. Rudy Gobert was too skinny and didn't play hard enough. Gary Harris wasn't a good enough ball handler and was too small. Rodney Hood was too skinny to play SF and not quick enough to play SG. Myles Turner ran funny. Devin Booker didn't have a good enough 1st step to get his own shot, and he wasn't 'long' enough. Malcolm Brogdon was slow, couldn't jump.
Just how good the late gems in the draft are varies, but there always are some. And often as not there are a couple potential stars there.

Payton would have been a beast in the 90's, back when PGs could get away with not being good shooters, and defense was all 1-on-1. Still might have struggled with that lack of consistent effort, but skill-wise, that was when he should have played.

But you cannot imply from something. This is an understandable mistake, considering the context. ?4thewin was saying that writers were making implications. You flipped it around to discuss the speculation based on those writers. Where you went wrong is that you did not flip from implication to inference. As ?4thewin read opinion pieces on the internet, he was making inferences based on the writers' implications. Let me be clear. To imply is to suggest, while to infer is to deduce, if you will. Think of implication as a QB and inference as a Receiver. You can infer from something, or you can imply something; just as a receiver can receive a ball from a quarterback, but if a quarterback were to receive the ball he would be a receiver. See, you inferred from what I said that I thought a second-round pick would be as good as Payton. That's not what I was implying. I was implying that Payton is not worth keeping around for what we'd have to pay him, but a second-round pick more likely would be. I'm speaking of value for payment, not simply basketball acumen. Of course Payton is better than your average second-round pick. But, considering we have DJ Augustine, Elfrid Payton is probably not worth keeping around for even the qualifying offer we'd have to give him (which, again, someone else would outbid, anyway). So getting a second round pick is good, because the alternative was either overpaying Payton or losing him for nothing.
For the record: I didn't mean to be rude with the "grammar lesson." I genuinely was trying to be helpful, as the the nuance between implication and inference is not something someone who isn't a writer (like me) or an English professor would always know. If you were the type of person to consistently misuse words, I would have ignored it, since I gathered from the context what you were trying to say. But since you generally seem to care about clarity in your posts, I thought you might want to know that you were using a word wrong. I sincerely apologize if it seemed I was trying to speak down to you. Grammar is just something I happen to know a lot about, because I have to be conscious of it all the time.

The word you were looking for in that first sentence, second clause, was infer not imply. Also, I think it's just as likely the second rounder turns into something we can at least keep and develop as it is Payton becomes something we regret getting rid of. Unless he becomes a completely different player defensively, he's not worth more than the potential qualifying offer (which doesn't matter, because some team will pay him more than he's worth).

You're asking me to pick who I think will come out of nowhere as a great player after #6 in this draft? That kinda goes against everything I'm talking about, but sure, I can see some candidates:
Sexton
Miles Bridges
Mikal Bridges
Obviously I wouldn't assume any one of these guys will be stars. But these three would be my picks of guys to come out of the 7-12 picks as stars. Of course, maybe someone completely different will do it. But it's almost certain someone will.

Sure, we can think that now. But people say that every year, to an extent. This past year was a crazy deep draft for star potential, everyone saying that you could get a potential star in the top 8 or 9. Who's the best rookie of this class so far? Donovan Mitchell, pick #13, who no one thought would be this good. 2009 was the year of Blake Griffin and then no one. Except Steph turned out to be Steph. No one saw that coming. 2010 was the John Wall Sweepstakes year. Except PG was picked 10th. 2012 was AD and no other stars, remember? except Beal and Drummond are great. There weren't supposed to be any stars in 2013. Oladipo, McCollum, and Giannis came out of nowhere.

Looking at the last ten years, it's clear that getting the #1 pick is great. But the #2 pick the last ten years has arguably worse (in terms of getting a star player) than getting #9. # 3 isn't really any better.

4 of the 10 All-Star starters are not top 3 picks. 10 of the 14 reserves. Something tells me we're better off worrying about player development and asset management than draft position. Not that I want desperately to see us win a bunch of meaningless games at the end of this season. But if the team suddenly starts playing hard every night, and it seems the culture is changing, slipping to 5th or 6th in the draft might be worth it (especially if Young falls, which I've seen a lot of people saying he will).
Edit: correction, 11 of 14 reserves. Westbrook was the 4th pick.

You and I agree that the moves we made the 2 years previous to this one (we didn't make any win-now moves this year, we just basically stood pat, which isn't tanking but not trying to win either) have been bad. We just disagree on whether it is the motivation or the execution that is the problem. Your point is that if we'd continued to tank harder we could have ended up with Ben Simmons or Jayson Tatum/Lauri Markanen?, which would put us in better position to win, plus we shouldn't have blown our wad on Biyombo and co. My point is that We had the players to end the tank (Oladipo and Gordon), we just mismanaged those players; the motivation wasn't the problem, it was the execution.
Saying ending the tank is why we suck is like blaming Hedo for Lee's missed layup at the end of Game 2 of the 2009 NBA Finals. The opportunity was there for us to end the tank. We failed because Skiles quit and Hennigan orchestrated quite possibly the worst off-season in NBA history (exaggeration, but certainly the worst in Orlando Magic history).

Of course ***** that guy. Don't for a second think I'm defending his behavior. But there's a wide gulf between '***** that guy' and taking every opportunity to blame our failures as a franchise on his hiring, especially since, from a basketball standpoint, he was far and away our best coach since Stan.

This is why trading our second pick last year was so stupid. Same goes with not extenbing Mario. If you have assets, especially picks, don't be afraid of them. The draft is a crapshoot. You might get AD from tanking, or you might get Bargnani. You might get Shabazz with a mid-1st pick, or you might get Giannis. You'll probably get Tyler Harvey with your second rounder, but you could get Jokic. They didn't know what they had in Mario. He'd barely played for them. But they were unwilling to take the small hit if he didn't work out. They didn't know what they could get with that pick, and they were unwilling to gamble. But gamblers don't win by only betting on sure things.

This. I'm not totally against tanking, but we failed our rebuild not because we didn't tank well enough. We failed because of this, not valuing our assets properly. We overvalued bad assets and undervalued good ones.

Again, I think Skiles actually had us going in the right direction. Hennigan made some bad moves in the sped up process, but let's be honest, the process should have worked, if we'd just chosen the right players to bet on. Think about it. We had two really good players in Victor and Aaron, both of whom were playing well and developing by the end of the Skiles year. Skiles clearly wanted to upgrade the PG position, which we should have done. He didn't seem too fond of Vuc, either, pulling him for long periods during games and even bringing him off the bench some at the end of the year (something we've all wanted to see). We won 35 games (a ten game improvement from the previous season), a total that in a lot of years would put you in contention for a playoff spot in the East. We were a team on the rise, if not quite as fast as we'd hoped. But Skiles punked out, and Hennigan lost his freakin' mind, trading our best player for garbage, forcing our second-best player to learn a new position, and spending crap-loads of money on terrible FA contracts.
I have little doubt if Skiles had just manned up, stuck around, we would have been a playoff team last year, and no doubt we would have been by this season. We were already headed in that direction, a Skiles team has never missed the playoffs in its second season, and - most importantly - we likely wouldn't have traded Victor Oladipo.
My point is that Hiring Skiles - a win-now coach - and changing gears to win-now mode isn't why we are terrible now. We got what we needed out of the tank, two potential All-Stars. We needed to switch to trying to win. Our management just failed the win-now switch on an epic level. We did everything you aren't supposed to do in that situation. Instead of building on what we'd already done, we panicked. Hennigan thought he was smarter than everyone in choosing Evan over 'Dipo. Vogel thought he could go against the league in playing a massive lineup with two guys who weren't shooting well. Again, we had the talent to switch gears, we just traded half of it away and ruined our cap flexibility.

You're missing the point. Oladipo makes us better. Look at Indiana's roster. It's not really any better than ours, but they're a playoff team because he is a beast for them. Nurkic, hood, WCS, Oubre make us better by being better assets than Elfrid Payton or Mario Hezonja (I am not willing to say Hezonja is as good as Oubre yet, because Oubre has done it a bit longer; Hezonja is fully welcome to prove me wrong). Nurkic is a much better defensive player than Vucevic (he plays harder is really the only difference, but that is how defense is). They are probably a wash overall (Vuc is much better offensively), but, as a center, defense is more important, which means Nurkic is the better asset (because we could also just keep him for fairly cheap as a starter without killing our defense like Vuc does). Hood is better than Elfrid, clearly. He's willing to come off the bench, good scorer, average defender. He would make it super easy to get rid of Fournier, and apparently he's worth Jae Crowder, which is a good if different bench piece. WCS has been solid this year. He's definitely worth more right now than Mario. Gary Harris would work just fine as Oladipo's excellent backup, 6th man. Probably we'd have to trade him rather than pay him, but think what we could get for him. Turner would indeed be nice. For once, I would have won that draft, because I loved Turner and wanted us to pick him (normally I'm not good with draft projections). I think he's the starting center on a playoff team, and is a terrific asset.

No. Us being terrible at money and asset management, and not being great at drafting is why we are where we are today. Imagine for a moment we're building around Oladipo and Gordon right now, with Sabonis as a nice bench asset. Imagine we didn't give up two 1sts and a 2nd for Elfrid Payton. Imagine we didn't pay Bismack Biyombo all the money in the world. Imagine we traded Vucevic two years ago when he was still an asset people would give something for. Ditto for Evan Fournier. Imagine if, instead of Elfrid Payton and Mario Hezonja, we had drafted any one of Jusuf Nurkic, Gary Harris, Rodney Hood, Clint Capela, Willie Cauley-Stein, Myles Turner, or Kelly Oubre; any of those guys would have been somewhat reasonable picks for us, drafted within the next ten picks and would not have been considered major reaches.
Would we be competing for a championship this year? Not likely. But we'd be a playoff team, young, with lots of assets to get better, and not drowning in bad contracts. We were fine at tanking. We had 3 picks in the top 5. Two have turned into really good players, one an All-Star. Unfortunately, we got rid of the All-Star for Terrence Ross, we botched the 3rd top 5 pick, and we spent all our excess money on garbage.

Cleveland sort of tanked for their players, in that Lebron would not have come their without the multiple #1 picks getting them Kevin Love. Fun fact: Kyrie was not a result of tanking. That was not their pick. But yeah, Houston did what I suggested, as did Boston. Golden State is an anomaly. They drafted multiple Hall of fame type players outside the top 5 within five years of each other. That's just...insane luck, mixed with brilliant scouting, mixed with great money management. Then they got Durant basically because of a league-wide salary cap anomaly. San Antonio tanked for a year 20 years ago and has never been out of the top five teams in the league since. Toronto is sort of a cheap, knock-off Golden State, in some ways, except they didn't draft all those guys. None of the league's best teams got great by tanking traditionally, though. Closest is probably, what, Washington? OKC, maybe? Philly in a few years if they continue to develop, sure; but not yet, and maybe not ever. OKC was at one point the poster child, but they never won it all, and they botched it horribly in the end.
But you'll never convince people of this. Best not to try.